Duchess of Malfi - Interpretations + Context Flashcards
What was the reaction when it was performed in Shakespeare’s globe in 2014
One paper called it a ‘grisly tragedy’, another a ‘gory melodrama’
What is the significance of Italy
Birthplace of the renaissance and centre of Catholic authority - provoked Jacobean dramatists with a horrid fascination
Potent theatrical metaphor - allowed dramatists to obliquely criticise the favouritism of James I court and to common on the religious hypocrisy under the guise of attacking scarlet-cloaked cardinals
What is the play based on
There was a real-life Duchess of Amalfi who was widowed in 1498, married and fled from her brothers
Webster took the story from a book called Palace Pleasure and embroidered it with ‘great skill’
Why is Webster’s heroine/protagonist unusual at the time
Focuses on a woman who exercises independent political power
How does the Duchess reverse the gender roles
Teasing and wooing Antonio
Also breaks the social and political obligation that the nobility marry their equals
Webster bases his plot on………….., every character has a secret with many episodes in the play depicting……….or overhearing
Secrecy
Spying
How does T.S.Elliot describe Webster
“Much possessed by death”
What does poet Rupert Brooke state
Talked about the “Foul and indestructible vitality” of Webster’s characters (these plays are about life and its awful and inevitable moral compromises, rather than about death)
Webster’s scalpel uncovers the “skull beneath the skin” - as he explores without favour, how flawed humans love, love and plot against a background of dispassionate self-interest
What do many of Webster’s other plays feature (The White Devil)
Teat lawyers and the legal system with bitterness - suggesting his personal detachment from it
What does Emma Smith state
“Rather than being possessed by death, Webster’s worlds show us the desperate struggle to survive in a corrupted society”
“The play’s unambivalent………………..becomes clear when we compare Webster’s………with that of his source, Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’
Femeinocentric
Title
What does Dympna Callaghan sate about the Duchess’ predicament
“Webster’s widowed Duchess escapes neither the confinement nor the brutality so often meted out to woman in the real world since her wicked brothers…seek to destroy her”
“In defying her brothers…the Duchess……………………………………….(Dympna Callaghan)
Transgresses a cultural prejudice against widows who remarried
In Elizabethan society - why did some widows remarry
As protection from coercion and harassment for themselves and their children
Dympna Callaghan - “Webster presents the Duchess not as an………………………………, but as real and fully………..
Oversexed pleasure-seeker
Human
Expand on “I am the Duchess of Malfi still”
Insist on the moral triumph of the Duchess’ stoicism in the face of death
What does the absence of the Duchess in Act 5 suggest
Dympna Callaghan
Insights on the necessity of looking squarely at the aftermath of the male violence to which she has been sacrificed
“Her absence, the gaping wound of the play, encourages us to question a world without women. And if that’s not feminist, then I don’t know what is”
How does Boklund see Julia as
“A parody of the Duchess, designed to undercut and qualify her values…to find a tragic flaw in the Duchess reflected nd confirmed in Julia”
Give a counter-argument to critics suggesting that Julia seems to be a fulfilment of the brother’s degraded vision of the Duchess
Yet very early in 2.4, Julia’s words and stage actions begin to contradict the Cardinal’s version of her
Her speech with its anxious, halting rhythm, betrays the deep inner struggle of a woman who has compromised herself for uncertain gain and finds herself the victim of a cynical and abusive man
Give two readings of stage presentations generally opting for an emphasis on the extreme lasciviousness of Julia
May affirm the satire of the corrupted church - by emphasizing the Cardinal’s sin and hypocrisy
Could also affirm his misogynistic attitude to his mistress as a whore
Those who emphasise the analogies between the duchess and Julia come perilously close to reading the play as a…………………………Those who concentrate on the differences tend to exaggerate the……………..of the Duchess and read the play as a melodrama
Underlying both of these perspectives is another implicit moral judgement - that Julia is meant to be condemned as a wanton,……………., morally………………woman
Cautionary tale
Saintliness
Promiscuous
Reprehensible
Did Julia appear in the original story
NO
Webster clearly thought the character had an important role in the architecture of the plot and the construction of the thematic argument
Give a quote from the Cardinal that presents a constant woman as an impossibility
“To view another spacious world i’th’moon/ And look to find a constant woman there”
Give some context for the Chain of Being
The feudal societies of the Middle Ages, ruled by an aristocracy of landowners, were based on a clear hierarchy
The hierarchy was justified, intellectually, by the idea of nature itself being composed of clear levels
